My reservations about The-Dream are many and well documented, but there's no denying that he's on a hot streak, and has already made two of the best R&B albums of the year (Eletrik Red's and his own). So the possibility of he and his production team, Tricky Stewart and LOS Da Mystro, pulling a hat trick with their third full-length project of 2009, Mariah Carey's Memoirs Of An Imperfect Angel, was kind of enticing. And it was only once I sat down with the album that I quickly got over my excitement and remembered what my reservations with The-Dream were, mainly his shallow bag of melodic tricks and obnoxious R. Kelly Jr. punchlines, and why those qualities are a terrible fit for Mariah. "Touch My Body" was silly but palatable enough, and "Obsessed" is kind of awesome if still pretty silly, but most of this album is like a study in why these two should not work together (which, by the way -- do you think Terius and Mariah ever had awkward afternoons in the studio where they had to make sure Nick Cannon and Christina Milian didn't both come visit them at the same time?). Now and then, there's a hook like "Inseparable" or "More Than Just Friends" to pull me in, but most of the time I'm just rolling my eyes so hard that my head hurts.

Memoirs opens with the horrific "Betcha Gon Know" which, along with "Standing O," is the album's worst example of Mariah doing The-Dream karaoke, basically sounding like she's singing over his guide vocal for a Love Vs. Money outtake. His penchant for goofy repetitive vocal riffs and odd lyrical details are just plain a bad fit for one of the most famous multi-octave belters of all time, and visions of Pebbles Flintstone dance through my head on half the songs. That weird line on "Up Out My Face" (you know the one) is so awkward and cringe-inducing that it makes the "bathing in Windex" line on "Obsessed" seem restrained and dignified by comparison. These are two hugely successful, pop-savvy artists who have each made tons of #1 hits, while at the same time being kind of eccentrics at heart, but together all they've got is a (relative) commercial dud that's too samey and similar to their previous work to be much of an artistic statement. The album actually gets way more enjoyable and laid back toward the end, when iti> enters this weird suite where pretty much every other track is a weird interlude or prelude or outro or reprise of one of the full songs, and all these recurring ideas and melodies get fleshed out in interesting ways. The news that they're rushing out a remix album to try and recover from the disappointing sales of Memoirs is unsurprising, but strangely encouraging, because it seems like Mariah and her producers were already toying with and expanding on these songs the first time around, and still have more tinkering to do. Anyway, they can't make a lot of these songs any worse.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 02, 2009 at 1:41 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.